Small Group Multicast
charter-ietf-sgm-01

A number of people in the Internet community have been advocating that
the IETF consider standardizing a method for handling multicast to
small
groups, where "small" is generally understood to be in the range of
3-10
or so participants. The rationale for this is twofold:

1) there are alleged to be a number of very important applications
which
have a small numbers of participants per group (e.g. classic audio and
video conferencing, collaboration tools, etc.) with an extremely large
number of such groups simultaneously active on the Internet.

2) Existing IP multicast methods, including newer specialized schemes
like Source Specific Multicast (SSM) are generally thought to have
scaling problems when there are a very large nubmer of groups, because
of per-group state in all the intermediate routers.

Because of the range of possible approaches to this problem and the
potential widespread impact on portions of the IP protocol suite,
router
implementation, operational practices, etc. of the Internet, the BoF is
being jointly hosted by the Routing and Internet areas, and will be
chaired by Randy Bush of the OPS area.